The contentious question of how many rules there should be seems to me as if it can be addressed in terms of the scope of the commons; a rough answer is, just enough rules to cover its scope.

People perceive the scope of the commons very differently. Tom illustrated the extremely narrow view held by Conservatives: Only physical aspects of the world that couldn't possibly be owned by somebody.

But starting over a century ago, people began to recognize a nonphysical form of commons, in terms of economies. Some see economic interdepency as forming a commons, and I tend to agree. If you look at the traditional definition of a "commons", it's not just something that nobody owns, it's more importantly something that everybody depends upon. If we all depend on an economy for our survival, then an economy is a commons.

Who owns the marketplace? Every business tries to own it, and when they succeed we try to slap it down as a monopoly, recognizing that no one individual or entity (participant) should control something upon which we all depend.

In the modern era many have come to recognize global interdependency, going beyond just the global economy to the entire mesh of geopolitical relationships, not to mention the global environment. We recognize that drought and famine affect us all, civil wars in Africa affect us all, and the existence of tyrants who oppress their people affects us all.

The world on the large scale is now our commons.

I'm not the first to observe that while we've developed an ad-hoc global society, we've not yet developed a global civilization, because we lack formal institutions for managing the global commons. A nation isn't considered modern unless it has institutions for managing its own commons, everything from dispute resolution (laws and courts), its physical defense, through its natural environment. But those institutions don't yet exist on a global scale, and I think that a large part of what troubles the world today, and will continue to trouble it, is that lack.

It's as if the world is Somalia writ large.

People are already defining the 21st century in terms of the concern of the moment. It's the "century of the environment" or the "century of terrorism", or what not. But maybe we should take the long view and define the century in a more forward-looking way: This is the century we have to finally get our act together and become an integrated global civilization.

(Oh damn, I just looked at the top of the page and remembered I'm on Flame. This is sooooo offtopic. Guess I just had this thought and ran with it.)